


The Gloaming

by karrenia_rune



Category: National Treasure (2004), Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Crossover, Gen, Portals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1967991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karrenia_rune/pseuds/karrenia_rune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben Gates gets caught up in more than he ever expected when an old friend puts him on the trail of a Celtic Key and accidentally lets loose an advance force off things out of legend that never thought could exist, but when his hunt for the key leads to a meeting with Jennifer Mills and her sister, Abbie, things actually begin to look up for a change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gloaming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/gifts).



Disclaimer: National Treasure belongs to its producers and directors. It is not mine. Sleepy Hollow belongs to its producers. None of the characters who appear here  
or are mentioned are mine, I am just 'borrowing' for the purposes of the story. Note: This is my first time writing this fandom so Ishie, I hope it serves! The title is from the Radiohead song  
by the same name.

"The Gloaming"

p>You’d think that Ben Gates would be willing to rest easy on his laurels after discovering and proving one of the world’s best-kept secrets about and having successfully prevented it from falling into the wrong hands, but much like the proverbial feline and its penchant from getting into trouble due to its own innate curiosity; Ben simply was not one to let well enough alone.

There were always more mysteries out there, more elusive clues to follow, and while those clues often did not lead in a straight line, or to expected results, half the time it was the journey itself that was half the fun, not merely the destination.

So, when an old colleague who specialized in rare manuscripts called him over to consult on a cache

“What have we got here? Ben asked, attempting to keep his tone neutral but polite, Wolf Larsen was known to sometimes let his exuberance over a rare find get the better of his academic judgment.

“I think it’s a lost folio of Edmund Spencer’s the “Faery Queen”, replied Larsen. And while the find is valuable for rare book collectors and antiquarian booksellers, which it is, I believe that there is more to it, much more.”

“I don’t follow,” said Ben.

“Of course not,” replied Wolf seriously. “Look, how many times in this line of work have we scientist and scholars been scoffed at for daring to believe that there are more things in this world that can’t be explained by deductive reasoning and modern science as we know it?”

“Too many,” replied Ben.

“Exactly my point!” exclaimed Wolf. “You see, the world is not only smaller than we know it, and much of that is caused by man-made forces, but I digress; it is also conversely much bigger than we know. Spencer and say  
poets like Yeats, and believed that was an invisible threshold between our world and that of other realms such as Faery, for example.

“Come off it, man,” Ben Gates scoffed, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

“I realize how this sounds,” Wolf Larsen replied, nodding emphatically, “but I’ve done extensive research into this and I’ve come to believe that our two worlds once co-existed, however, over the centuries we’ve drifted apart, with the Tuatha de Dannan as the Irish referred to them moving further and further away until they were forced to go away completely. The only thing we’re missing is the key,”

“What key?”

“The key that will unlock a door.”

“I don’t know about this.” Ben hemmed and hawed, “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’re right, maybe it’s a door that we should leave closed, Wolf. 

“Ben,” “Wolf replied. “How long have we been friends?”

“All through college and graduate school,” Ben answered, even as he wondered why his initial reticence about the proposal and the feeling that somehow having Wolf suggest searching for the key gradually m melting away in the intensity of the other man’s dark-eyed gaze. That somewhere along in the course of the conversation suggesting looking for the key had become more than a mere suggestion.

The rain pattering outside the windows of Larsen’s university office had gradually given way to a dark blue-metal sky scudding with heavy clouds.  
Ben felt as if he were a man swimming against a tide, a tide that he could not long resist, trying to keep his head above water.

‘Sooner or later I will go down; maybe it would just be better to give into to it, Ben thought and then shoved the meandering thoughts to a back corner of his mind. Aloud he said, “All right, all right, I’ll do it. But you’ll owe me one, Wolf.”

“You got it,” replied Wolf earnestly.

Interlude

Ben meets August Corbin and Jenny Mills while looking for the key

The man that he’d been told to meet in a local diner over coffee and apple pie of all things

The key was Celtic: fitting in with the theme of the clues he’d been following up to till this point, and if a fit of frustration and perhaps a bit of bad-tempered juvenile humor, had wondered if at the end of this particular trail he would a leprechaun and a pot of gold. Not that it mattered, he didn’t need the gold, and he certainly did not believe in leprechauns or fairies for that matter, when you came down to it.

Despite his promise to locate the key for Wolf Larsen, Ben gates was above all, a seeker after knowledge and a pragmatist, despite his livelihood, one did not have to believe in the magical trappings and mythology surrounding the mysteries of the world.

“You should really try the apple pie a la mode,” began Corbin, “they really do have a way of making it melt right there on your plate if you wait about five minutes before eating it that’s absolutely wonderful.”

“I’m sure it is, but I’m more of a lemon meringue kind of guy, thanks,” replied Ben.

August Corbin shrugged, and said, “Suit yourself.” He took a bite of his own pie and putting it into his mouth. He finished chewing and washed it down with a sip of coffee.

“The thing of it is I don’t quite reckon where we should begin. I realize that you’re here seeking answers, answers that aren’t easy to come by, am I right?”

“You could say that,” Ben said.

“I just did.”

The young woman, who had been introduced to him as Jennifer Mills, was as about as wound up as anyone he had ever met, tense as a spring on a flintlock rifle, but she had an undeniable edge to her; Ben had not yet decided it if sheer nerves or something more, like suppressed adrenaline that drove her. She was more difficult to read than the affable and seemingly open August Corbin. 

“Here’s the thing, you hunt artifacts and relics of all kind, that’s what you, it’s your job, and from what I’ve learned about you Mr. Gates, you rather good at it.”

“I am,” Ben replied more defensively than perhaps he should have under the circumstances.

“Well, may I ask who or what sent you on your current path?” asked Corbin

“An old colleague of mine, by the name of Wolf Larsen,” answered Ben.

“Don’t recognize the name, but that doesn’t tell us much, right, Jenny?” Corbin asked the young intense black woman with long hair and long lanky frame.

Nodding Jennifer Mills replied. “He could just be one of those mortals duped into convincing someone else to search for the key, or he could be an exile, either way, we need to get to the key before it falls into the wrong hands.”

“This key, you really believe that it exists?” Ben asked.

“We do, and that’s why it’s important that we find it.”  
***

‘Of all places to search,’ thought Ben, ‘I never expected to be digging around in the root cellar of an old house that had once belonged to the Masons. ‘

The connection to assorted pieces of American History, specially the Revolutionary War was becoming more than a coincidence, and as a scholar of history, he had to follow the trail of coincidence and see where it led, but at the moment, it’s all he can do to keep crawling along the tail behind Jennifer Mills carrying his flashlight and trying to see a few feet beyond its yellow glow. 

Jenny, moving up ahead of him, in a more or less upright position, dusted some but not all of the grit from her shirt and pants and signaled for him to join her in the egress of the tunnel they had been crawling through. 

“Here,” she said, pointing with her own flashlight beam at a concave depression in the fall opposite of where they stood.

Pressed into was a wall five by five feet depression with what Ben Gates recognized as the distinctive Celtic knot-work. Jenny pressed it with the heel of her hand and the wall swung inward on rusty hinges. 

They stole significant glances with one other before proceeding farther into the room that was hidden behind the door. Inside was a chamber with only a stone slab whose only decoration was a stone object that could have fit into the palm of one’s hand, covered over every inch of its surface with Celtic knot-work. 

“We found it,” Jenny sighed in a hushed undertone as if to speak any louder would make the moment disappear into thin air. She walked towards the stone slab her hand outstretched, but not yet touching the key that they had been looking for so many weeks.

“May I?” he asked. 

Jenny startled for a moment, and then quickly recovered. “Yes, but be careful.”

Ben crossed the distance between the doorway and the stone slab and hefted the key in his hand; it was heavier than it looked and it might have just been his imagination and the lack of sleep and dehydration that made him think for a moment that they key throbbed with a kind of intermittent electric hum.  
***  
Encounter

If Jennifer Mills was intense in her movements, mannerisms, and tone, her older sister was a slightly lesser light; not that Abbie Mills didn’t give off the vibe that she could take care of herself in a fight. Abbie gave off a similar vibe but it was not as burning bright as Jenny Mills’ burning intensity.

He didn’t know what the history between them, because since that first meeting in the diner when he’d been looking for the key all those weeks ago, and learning that her mentor/friend Sherriff Corbin had been killed.  
Jennifer Mills had not mentioned anything about a sister. Jenny Mills had briefly mentioned that she’d been locked up in insane asylum for going about the existence of things that would be better off left to the realm of nightmares and things that went bump in the night, and her sister had refused to believe her, be there when she could have used her Abbie’s help.

Ben figured it wasn’t his place to pry, and because his head was still reeling after everything he’d experienced thus far.

“Can we trust this guy?” Abbie asked.

“He’s with me,” Jenny replied.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Ichabod Crane attempted to intervene,” perhaps we should concentrate on the task at hand.”

“You’ll forgive me, Jenny, if I can’t take your word for it.

“Well, tough, you’re just gonna have to, Sis,” Jenny retorted.

“Um, I hate to break this up, but look at the arch, is it my imagined or is it glowing?” Ben interrupted

“I too discern a distinct glow,” replied Ichabod.

Fight scene

The stone arch glimmered with a pale iridescent light of its own that had little or nothing to do with the light of the moon shining down from the dome of the pearl-gray sky above them. Even after he’d placed the key in the depression in the arch he could not have said if he’d done so out of sheer curiosity to see what would happen, or out of completion, or it could have been a darker compulsion, but the results were as sudden and unexpected as a sucker punch to the gut.

They had found themselves facing off against an advance force of dark elves who are attempting to gain a foothold in the mortal world.

Ever since that initial meeting on a river boat near where George Washington had crossed the Delaware River in the dead of night, to steal a march on the British Red Coats, there was one thing he had learned about both the late Sherriff Corbin and his assistant in hunting ancient relics, Jennifer Mills, both had been onto something big, very big.

While he did not learn very much about Corbin, other than he Jenny, in her way, and now her once-estranged sister was grieving for the man; instead of allowing their grief to get the better of them they had used his death as a catalyst to galvanize them into fighting the good fight, to stand against the forces of air and darkness that would otherwise gain a foothold in the mortal world.

Ben didn’t quite know what to make of that, but the key he had found had indeed unlocked an entry-way to a world he had never imagined existed, could even exist alongside the every-day mundane world. 

However, He was here, they were here, right before his eyes, their horses gouging deep holes in the damp, dry soil of a pine wood in the fall was a small host of mounted armor-clad fairies with moonlight glinting in the manes of their horses, their long almost platinum blonde hair streaming from the helms they wore.

The leader dug his heels into his mount’s flanks and brought himself three paces ahead of the others, “Stand in our way, mortals, and you will be killed, allow us to pass on into your world and you will be allowed to live.” 

“Yeah, well I’ve got news for you, Pretty Boy, that isn’t going to happen,” Abbie retorted, 

“I concur,” Ichabod exclaimed.

“Mortal follies, as ever will be their undoing,” the elven leader remarked and with that he gave some kind of intricate hand signal to his followers and they immediately spurred forward.

Ichabod Crane, no stranger to fighting, although he’d been in a kind of suspended animation for the past two hundred years, took a tighter grasp on the barrel of his flint-lock rifle and suggested that the four of them, spread out, cover more ground and make that much more difficult for their opponents to attack.

He was well aware that mounted fighters had the advantage of fighters on foot, but there really was no reason to worry his friends and new ally about that.

Abbie had taken up a position behind a piece of tumbled masonry for better cover and had climbed up on it, and began shooting lead projectiles into the oncoming mounted elven cavalry. Perhaps it was a fortunate coincidence that they were only a dozen or so.

Ichabod also hoped that old bromide that the fay was vulnerable to iron still held true, because otherwise, they might be in for a great deal of trouble here.

Jennifer had also taken up stance and was attacking those that had fallen off their mounts by her sister’s gunfire and Ichabod Crane’s gunfire.

The elves had not expected to be counter-attacked and were startled, but quickly recovered. At one point in the fight, Jenny had wrestled a sword from one of the fallen elves and was trading blows with another.

Ben Gates had never held a sword in his entire life, but that did not stop Jenny Mills from shoving one into his hand and brusquely informing to stick his opponents with the pointy end, adding several other instructions while she was at it. He’d have to take her word for it because he didn’t know the first thing about fighting, other than hitting the other guy harder than he hit you and trying to keep on your feet while you were at it.

An elf that had been knocked off his horse and with his arm looking as if it were dipped in a bucket of red paint came at him with a dagger with a wickedly sharp serrated blade. It was all Ben could do to first realize that this was really happening to him, recognize the danger he was in, and take up what he could manage as a defensive stance, reflexively holding out the sword Jenny had given him, and sticking the oncoming elf with the pointy end. He could her Abbie somewhere off to his left shouting a warning to look out, but it was remote and as if it were happening to someone else.

The elves had regrouped now, and of the dozen who had emerged from the portal half were bleeding from a dozen or more shallow cuts and bullet holes, but the fight had not yet gone out of them.

At the moment, Abbie Mills cried out, “Wait a moment, I’ve got it!”

“What is it?” asked Ichabod.

“A key turns both ways, right?” said Abbie Mills. “So if the key can open the portal it stands to reason that it can also close it.”

“Capital idea!” Ichabod replied. “But, I would imagine, by that logic, the same person who opened the portal must needs also seal it.

“Meaning me,” sighed Ben wearily as he used a brief lull in the attack to use his sword as a crutch.

“Yes, can you manage it?” asked Ichabod.

“I think so,” Ben replied. “Just get me over there and I’ll do it.”

With Abbie and Jenny covering them, Ichabod helped get Ben over to the portal, all the time Ben wondered if the two women could handle themselves on their own, or their ammo would run out. Either way, there was nothing he could do about either eventuality at the moment. 

Ben had concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, and reach his objective. Once he was near the arch he tried to rack his brain for which way he had turned the key to activate the portal in the first place, ‘Was is it clock-wise or counter-clockwise? Or the other way around? Think, man! Think!’ he chided himself. 

“I can’t afford to get this wrong!” With that, and Ichabod Crane turning to one side in case that the elves noticed what they were doing and tried to stop them Ben reached for the key and turned it to the right, once and then twice, and finally a third time, because he remembered hearing something about there being power in sequences of threes.

The result was astonishing as it was rapid, the portal began to lose most of its iridescent gleam and the small elven host, minus most of its horses began to beat a hasty withdrawal before it closed completely.  
The leader, turned to give them one last glance back before he too disappeared, “saying, “You are only delaying the inevitable, mortals. Be warned.” With that, he too was gone.”

Ben sagged and turned to regard Ichabod Crane. “My head hurts. Is it over?”

“Yes, I believe it is,” replied Crane as he placed a reassuring hand on Ben Gates shoulder.

***

 

Conclusion  
“I didn’t, I mean, I never imagined that anything like this was even possible, let alone existed,” Ben said, as he sat slumped over in the arm-chair in the cabin that Abbie Mills had taken them all to in her car. It had been a tight fit for all of them, and no one had felt much like talking after the fight with the advance scouting party of elves that had emerged from the portal.

Now that it had been sealed and the immediate danger had paused he was still trying to wrap his head around it all. 

“It’s not your fault,” said Jenny. “If you remember, Ben, we speculated that your colleague, Wolf Larsen could have been a mortal that was working for the fay and was using your long friendship to trade on it and use you to gain the key and then trick into doing just what you did.

Ben heaved a sigh that seemed to make his entire frame shudder with suppressed tension, before he added, “You’re right, I think. I mean I want to believe that, but somehow I don’t feel better about it.

“At the last minute, your friend over there, are you really Ichabod Crane?” Ben asked.

“I have that honor, Mr. Gates,” replied Ichabod.

“Okay, okay, but what if we hadn’t hit on the idea of once the key was in place?”

Abbie Mills shook her head, reaching up to run the heels of her hands through the short black strands. “I’d rather not think about that particular contingency if you don’t mind. It doesn’t bode well. 

“I concur.” Ichabod replied. “You did well. Mr. Gates.”

Abbie smiled and said, “Very well, and I’m sorry I was so harsh on you earlier. It’s been, well, difficult to whom to trust, what with all the weirdness and everything.”

“I understand,” Ben replied. “Don’t’ worry about it, Miss Mills. “

“What the Lieutenant is trying to say, is that we understand the position that you were put in, and Jennifer Mills trust you, then that is good enough for us.”


End file.
